Carl Levin

WASHINGTON -- The head of a Senate panel investigating the financial crisis is questioning the accuracy of testimony Goldman Sachs executives gave to Congress last year about whether the firm steered investors toward mortgage securities it knew would likely fail.
Goldman Sachs and Co. agreed in July to pay $550 million to settle civil fraud charges over similar accusations.
Douglas Graham, Roll Call / Getty Images
Sen. Carl Levin and Sen. Tom Coburn arrive at the briefing on the Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Permanent Investigations Subcommittee's new re...

New rankings of the Senate's most liberal members -- a list including Harry Reid and powerful committee chairmen Carl Levin and Patrick Leahy -- suggest moderates are fading from the scene on Capitol Hill.
Senate Majority Leader Reid (D-Nev.), who was elected to a fifth term in November, has become more liberal in his voting record in the past three years, the National Journal said in its annual rankings. The magazine had the Senate leader as the 22nd most liberal lawmaker in 2009 and 25th on its list the year before that.
Writer Ronald Brownstein said the vote ratings marked a peak in polar...

The U.S. Army ordered a "psychological operations" team to manipulate visiting U.S. senators into pushing for more funding and troops for the war in Afghanistan, according to a report in Rolling Stone magazine.
Three-star U.S. general Lt. Gen. William Caldwell is accused of deploying propaganda techniques, which the Army says are intended to "alter the behavior of foreign populations," against visiting U.S. dignitaries to Afghanistan in a potentially illegal, months-long operation to lobby Congress. Caldwell is responsible for the training of Afghan security forces.
Gen. David Petraeus, the ...

Amid applause, cries of thanks and chants of "Yes we can!," President Obama on Wednesday repealed the U.S. military's "Don't ask, don't tell" policy, which for 17 years had banned gay service members from serving openly in the armed services. Proclaiming that the policy "will strengthen our national security," the president vowed that "no longer will tens of thousands of Americans in uniform be asked to live a lie. Or look over their shoulders in order to serve the country they love."
Paraphrasing Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen -- a leading advocate of repeal -- Obama added, "Our peo...

They often won by running against Washington and pledging to govern as outsiders.
But when the freshmen of the 112th Congress take their oaths of office in January, they'll find that some of their senior colleagues have made the House and Senate quite the family business
Think spouses, sisters, brothers and cousins, an octet of lawmakers serving together in one or both chambers.
Last week's Senate win by Rand Paul (R-Ky.), son of 11-term Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.), revived the category of concurrent filial service, which had been dormant for more than a year. From 1995 to 2009 it was occupied b...

LONDON (Oct. 22) -- The WikiLeaks website is poised to release what the Pentagon fears is the largest cache of secret U.S. documents in history - hundreds of thousands of classified intelligence reports since the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
U.S. officials said Friday they were racing to contain the damage from the imminent release, while NATO's top official told reporters he feared that lives could be put at risk by the mammoth disclosure.
NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said any release would create "a very unfortunate situation."
"I can't comment on the details of the exact impact on security...

What do Bernie Sanders, Jeff Flake, Mitch Daniels, Cory Booker, and Al Franken have in common? This is not much of a hint, but that list is comprised, in order, of the following: the only Socialist in Congress, a Tea Party-minded Arizona Republican also in the House of Representatives, the can-do Republican governor from Indiana, the reform-minded African-American mayor of Newark, New Jersey, and a formerly foul-mouthed liberal Hollywood comedian-turned-politician who now sits in the U.S. Senate representing a state where the highest compliment is to say that they are truly "Minnesota nice."
...

(Oct. 7) -- The sordid tale of thugs, violent crime and greed could have been lifted from a Quentin Tarantino film. In fact, that's likely what the Western security firms operating in Afghanistan had in mind when they dubbed local warlords on their payroll "Mr. White" and "Mr. Pink" -- names ripped straight from the film "Reservoir Dogs."
The tangled web of warlords, contractors and crime eventually involved a raid that left civilians dead, and even prompted a call from then-President George W. Bush to the Afghan president to apologize for civilian deaths, according to a Senate investigation ...

The Senate will take a key vote Tuesday to avoid a Republican filibuster on the Department of Defense Authorization bill, the annual legislation that sets policies and spending levels for the Pentagon. But two controversial additions to the bill -- language to begin the repeal of the ban on gays serving openly in the military and a last-minute amendment to give young illegal immigrants a path to citizenship -- have significantly complicated the bill's fate.
"Do we have the votes?" Sen. Carl Levin said Monday at a press conference. "My answer is, 'I don't know whether we have the votes or not...

Sen. Carl Levin might like pie, but surely not served this way. The Michigan Democrat was listening to a question at constituent meeting in the town of Big Rapids on Monday when a woman struck him in the face with a pie.
Ahlam M. Mohsen, 22, of Coldwater, Mich., will be arraigned Tuesday, the AP reports, after being held without bond on a felony charge of stalking and misdemeanor counts of assault and disorderly conduct.
Mohsen told the Big Rapids Pioneer she hoped "to send a message that liberals and Democrats are just as implicated in the violence [of war] as the Republicans."
Big Rap...